Nonprofits

I Want You to Meet Joe

Erin Hall’s stomach sank as she
sat at a roundtable with 40 of
Colorado’s most powerful decision
makers in a conference room in
downtown Denver last summer. Hall,
the project manager of a new mental
health and substance abuse program
in a semi-remote, northern part of the
state, in Northern Larimer County, had
been invited to present at the
statewide mental health summit. In a
freakish stroke of bad luck, her Power-
Point presentation had failed to
accompany her there. While awaiting
her turn, trying to listen to the presenters
and not draw attention to herself,
she frantically worked to have a
backup copy e-mailed to her. She listened
to several data-heavy presentations,
anxiously watching the audience
– which included the president of
the County Sheriffs of Colorado and
several state representatives – nod
their heads in agreement.

Hall, an energetic 40-year-old, and
former occupational therapist, had a
brand-new presentation that
explained what her program did without
the usual charts and statistics so
prevalent in her field, instead relying
on telling a simple story with compelling
photographs.

She had been planning to utilize
this new approach at the conference,
which “no one really important will
attend,” she recalls thinking. But the
conference was surprisingly well
attended, and Hall stood alone in not
having a data-driven presentation – or
any presentation, for that matter.
“The presentations were all charts,
tables, and stats, and I’m thinking
mine is all stories, all pictures, no data,
and no facts,” she recalls.

In the midst of this stressing, she
received word that her assistant had
succeeded in e-mailing the presentation
to the wireless laptop of a colleague
in the building. A CD-ROM was
spirited into the room, and suddenly
her first slide was up on the screen.
She took a deep breath, tried to
ignore the fact that she was sitting
beside many of the state’s most
prominent movers and shakers in law
enforcement, education, healthcare,
and business, and grabbed the
remote.

“I’d like for you to get to know
Joe,” Hall began, as a picture of a distraught,
40-something, slumped-over
man appeared on the screen. (Joe is a
real person, whose name was changed
to protect his identity.) “Joe’s really a
nice guy once you
get to know him,
but he’s had a
pretty tough life,
and now he just
doesn’t care too
much whether he
lives or dies. And if
you want to get to
know him, you’ll
have to go on down
to the jail, because
that’s where he is,”
she continued.

Thirty-one slides
and 25 minutes
later, Hall had
recounted Joe’s sad
life story complete
with the appalling
admission that in the two years since
he’d been in her community: “Joe has
been involved with at least 11 organizations,
none of which coordinated
any of his care. He’s been contacted
by police at least 50 times; he has
been in and out of the ER, detox, and
jail; he has nearly lost his life several
times, and he has cost the system
nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
And the outcome was jail.”

At this point in her delivery, Hall
deliberately paused. Telling a story
like this in a professional context was
completely different from anything
she’d ever done. The audience
remained deadly silent throughout
the telling of her tale – a reaction she
couldn’t tell was good or bad. Sounding
as ambitious and official as she
could, Hall told the assembled group
that, terrified and inspired by the
alarming story of Joe, her county
health district was in the midst of a
massive systemwide overhaul. It was
completely restructuring itself to
make it work better for people like
Joe. In her old-style presentations, this
would have been the part where Hall
went into lengthy detail showing
charts outlining the 12 strategies for
uniting 34 different organizations
under a common umbrella, called the
Community Mental Health and Substance
Abuse (MHSA) Partnership. On
this day, she simply showed a slide of
a successful, 40-something man in a
shirt and tie, smiling and holding a
pair of glasses, accompanied by the
question, “What if Joe’s story had
been different?”

Hall then recounted an entirely
new Joe story, still no fairy tale, but
one where Joe received proper, coordinated
treatment over the course of
his life for what he learned was his
bipolar disorder. “He has had no jail
time, has used remarkably less primary
care, the police and ambulance don’t
even know who he is, and he has
never again been close to suicide,”
explained Hall. “The first Joe is reality,
the second Joe is the changed reality
that we’re working on. Our partnership
really believes that things can
look different for the Joes of the
world.”

The slide show ended, the lights
went on, and just like a scene out a
heart-tugging movie, the 40 listeners
jumped up from their chairs and, for
the first time all day, broke into thunderous
applause. “Holy cow! They
really liked it and it touched them,”
Hall remembers thinking at the time.
The rest of the day, the entire group
talked about Joe, bringing him into
the context of every program they
address. “How would this affect Joe?”
they would ask. Since the summit,
word of the Joe story and Northern
Larimer County’s ongoing massive
revamping of its mental health and
substance abuse program continues to
spread far beyond the county.

The MHSA Partnership is being
used as a model for a statewide group
trying to help other counties implement
similar systemic changes. This
past fall, Hall got a call from the state
governor’s office asking permission to
use the Joe story in one of its presentations.
For Hall’s birthday, co-workers
gave her a life-size cutout of Joe holding
a birthday card signed by all of
them. “We take him to meetings with
us now to keep us on track,” quips
Hall. “Joe lives, for sure.”

That afternoon, Hall became a storytelling
zealot. In the nonprofit
world, she is hardly alone. Increasingly,
iterations of the Joe story and
its impact on Northern Larimer
County’s health district are being
replicated across the country, as nonprofit
and philanthropic organizations
of all stripes recognize and harness
the power of storytelling.

Serious Business of Storytelling

Nonprofits are using stories to sway
board members, investors, and policymakers.
The Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, for instance, which funds
nearly 1,000 different healthcare initiatives
annually, began incorporating
storytelling seminars into its programs
in 2000, and made a workshop on storytelling
the centerpiece of its annual
meeting last fall. (Hall was one of its
panel presenters.) Faith in Action,
which runs hundreds of community
faith-based volunteer initiatives across
the country, treated 300 of its members
to a storytelling workshop at its
plenary session last summer. The very
next day, more than 250 of its staffers,
armed with their freshly minted stories
as lobbying tools, marched on
Capitol Hill and told their tales as they
met with their state representatives.
(One congressman, Minnesota’s James
L. Oberstar, was so taken by the stories
he heard, he read them into the
Congressional Record.)

Environmental Defense, one of
America’s most influential environmental
advocacy groups, chose storytelling
as the theme for its summer
2003 retreat. At Environmental
Defense, which boasts more Ph.D. scientists
and economists on staff than
any similar organization, “One has a
tendency to speak in terms of the
data,” concedes Joel Plagenz, its associate
director. “At the workshop, we
learned that the story can trump the
data. Speaking in stories is clearly a
more effective way of communicating.”

Nonprofits that have realized the
power of storytelling are using stories
to communicate with their stakeholders
in a variety of mediums beyond inperson
presentations – from holiday
cards to annual reports. In addition,
stories are cropping up on an increasing
number of nonprofits’ Web sites,
where the well-chosen tale can
poignantly and efficiently encapsulate
a particular program. Local Initiative
Funding Partners, a grant-matching,
grassroots offshoot of the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation, features a
particularly rich “Storybook” section
on its Web site (www.lifp.org) with
both written and audio stories.
“Daddy Hurt Mommy Again,” for
example, vividly depicts the critical
role one of LIFP’s domestic violence
grant recipients played in the greater
Kansas City, Mo., area by telling a
story in the words of a 5-year-old.

Another entry in the LIFP Storybook,
“On the Loose,” is a streaming
audio collection of rap poems lifted
from a CD written and produced by
teenagers from the Healing Arts, an
LIFP project in San Antonio that helps
abused youth express their feelings
through the arts. Hearing the poems
recited by the teenage girls’ own
voices makes their work, and by
extension that of the supporting nonprofit,
come alive in a way that cannot
be matched by any chart or report.

Stories to Motivate and
Educate Staff

Nonprofit groups are also using stories
to acclimate new staffers through
staff handbooks. One such handbook,
“Staff Told Tales: Stories about Environmental
Defense by the people who
made them happen,” features the
irresistibly titled chapter “I Eat RCWs”
(endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers,
that is). Written in a folksy,
easily understood way, the story
recounts the compromise reached
between Environmental Defense and
a crotchety North Carolinian
landowner who initially couldn’t care
less how the Endangered Species Act
affected the pesky woodpeckers that
made their homes in his family’s longleaf
pine forests.

Others, like Erin Hall and her health
district colleagues, use storytelling as
an internal reporting mechanism – “to
understand our systems and each
other’s limitations,” as she says. After
all, the Joe story only emerged when
she was new to her job and asked
staffers to tell a true-to-life case example
that helped illustrate how their
particular agency worked. When it
turned out that four of the seven stories
were written about the same person,
and that eight of the 13 people
at the table knew this person because
they had all served him (not being
able to name him for privacy reasons,
they christened him Joe), all realized
their system was woefully in need of
revamping. To keep on top of her
organization, Hall today is constantly
on the hunt for new Joe stories, and
has even come up with some new
characters whose stories illustrate
other features and services of her
county health district.

One Mark of a Good Story:
Throw Rocks at Your Hero

The stories nonprofits use are as varied
as the organizations themselves,
but the good ones all have at least
one thing in common: obstacles.
While the temptation will always be
to jump to the happy ending (and
what your fabulous organization did
to bring it about), good storytellers
know to prolong this moment by
throwing obstructions in the way. To
paraphrase legendary Hollywood
screenwriting guru Robert McKee, a
good story proceeds as follows: “Act I:
Get your hero up a tree. Act II: Throw
rocks at him. Act III: Bring him down.”

To be riveting, good stories need
these ups and downs. They make protagonists
more sympathetic and interesting.
That’s why Hall shares the
appalling admissions about how uncoordinated
Joe’s care was in her health
district’s initially fragmented system.
It’s why the “I Eat RCWs” tale features
the pipe-clenching, environmentalist-hating
forester whose license plate
inspired the story’s name, as well as an
equally cantankerous colleague who
blurts: “This is ridiculous. You can’t
trust the Fish and Wildlife Service. You
can’t trust Environmental Defense or
any other environmentalists and no
one should do this.” Sharing the low
points of an organization makes a
reader care long enough to stick
around to hear about its high points.

To be sure, the process can be
tricky. Storytelling organizations want
to be humble but also impressive, confident
but not sanctimonious in the
telling of their tales. Striking this balance
is not easy. Neither is instilling
the discipline not to rush to the happy
conclusion. As Debbie Dunn Solomon,
LIFP’s director of communications,
concedes, “There are a lot of pitfalls
out there to storytelling.” Still, her
nonprofit, like scores of others, is convinced
that the benefits of good storytelling
are well worth their challenges.
“It has completely changed the way
we do things,” she notes.

Why Are Stories More Effective?

What do these enlightened storytelling
nonprofits know that the rest
of their colleagues don’t? While it is
rare to meet an individual who doesn’t
like a good story, most people
intuitively categorize storytelling as a
leisurely – rather than a professional –
pursuit. Storytelling may be fine for
sitting around a campfire or bedtime,
but if you want to persuade seriousminded
individuals in a professional
context, throw numbers, charts, and
statistics their way, the thinking goes.
As Hall notes of her former, pre-Joe
presentations, “Before we tried to let
the statistics speak for themselves.”
But guess what? “They don’t. They’re
not memorable,” she deadpans.

In fact, data and statistics actually
point out that data and statistics are a
surefire way of losing your audience.
As Andy Goodman, who teaches storytelling
to nonprofits for a living, likes
to say: “Numbers numb, jargon jars,
and nobody ever marched on Washington
because of a pie chart. If you
want to connect with your audience,
tell them a story.”

Goodman, a former Hollywood sitcom
writer, is an evangelist for storytelling.
He counts among his clients
Environmental Defense, Jane
Goodall’s Chimpanzee Collaboratory,
and the Centers for Disease Control, to
name just a few. Interspersed between
explanations of human evolution as a
storytelling culture and biological evidence
of a nodule in our brain whose
sole purpose is to make narrative
sense of all input, Goodman says
something very simple and very alarming
in his workshops: “Don’t assume
that anyone is interested in anything
you have to say! … In a two-hour
speech, people will remember a two-minute
story.”

“Telling stories has become one of
the most powerful aspects of what we
do,” agrees Larry Weisberg, Faith in
Action’s communications director. “It
isn’t about the grant money. It isn’t
about the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation. It’s about relationships
between the people who help and the
people who are helped [something
we share through stories].”

What’s more, the process of story
gathering and storytelling can be far
more enjoyable than compiling data.
Now that she’s become somewhat of a
veteran raconteur, Erin Hall describes
an added benefit of storytelling. Not
only is the Joe story a great way to
explain a complicated project in a
compelling manner, she notes: “It’s
also fun. I like to tell it, and people
like to hear it.”

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